


Ash Spring

by NarcissusPhinea



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Alive!Primrose, F/M, Not Epilogue Compliant, Past Katniss/Peeta, Peeta kind of annoys Katniss not because I don't like him but because she's got trauma and stuff, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, so sorry to everlark shippers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-28
Updated: 2019-06-28
Packaged: 2020-05-28 17:51:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19399297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NarcissusPhinea/pseuds/NarcissusPhinea
Summary: After the war, Katniss has to make a home. Prim is still alive, though it's hard to be around Peeta for very long. Gale, though. Gale is easy.





	Ash Spring

She was a girl in the middle of a war and she was no longer a person.

  
Katniss was a symbol. Mockingjay. Everything she did was for the sake of inspiring the rebellion, helping other people take down Snow.

  
Everything was messy. She couldn't stop it; her life was no longer her own... Even her death would be theirs. Katniss wanted Snow dead, but some great part of her resented District Thirteen, Haymitch, Finnick, Gale. Everyone involved in that business.

  
Peeta was the one pure thing left, and he was in the Capitol being tortured. It was proof that nothing, nothing was untouchable. But then she already knew that. It'd been hammered in, over and over and over again. Primrose was reaped. Finnick was a prostitute for the Capitol at age fourteen because he was just a little too charming (and he wouldn't have won otherwise). Peeta was being held by the Capitol where they did God-knew-what to him. (Katniss was allowed to touch Peeta, and that was number four on the list of things wrong).

  
•

  
Then the war was over (as over as anything can be) and Alma Coin was dead. Katniss didn't feel anything. She supposed distantly that it wasn't the idea of a Hunger Games for Capitol citizens that bothered her, but just the knowledge that they'd eventually screw everyone over because people like Snow and Coin were never happy with what they had.

  
As someone who lived the way Katniss had, the thought of a little girl from the Capitol--maybe she'd look a little like Primrose, even--being reaped and tortured for politics so much bigger than her didn't even inspire any sense of protectiveness in Katniss. There was nothing. She thought there might be righteous anger, but there wasn't. It was just hollow.

  
So she went back to District Twelve to live near the people who she thought were supposed to mean something to her. Haymitch used to be like a father to Katniss, didn't he? And he understood certain things in a way no one else did. He seemed to accept what had happened to all of them, including the things he himself had done. And Peeta--they'd fought together. She'd done things for him that couldn't be taken back.

  
Although Peeta was different now. Constantly asking real or not real about everything and Katniss couldn't handle it very often. She didn't have any energy and when she did, it wasn't for someone to undermine her sense of reality. Peeta was never supposed to be broken in the first place.  
  
There was nothing in her left for shame over the things she'd done, and yet Peeta had a way of making her feel awful without trying to.

  
She avoided him quite often.

  
And then there was Gale. It felt so strange to see him with all the history attached, but at least he knew what things were true and what was just delusion. In some ways, it reminded her of when she thought she was a real human being (although whether she actually was was debatable), before the first Games. He was a little bit rougher around the edges, but still startlingly Gale.

  
Poetically unlike herself, Katniss thought he was like the feeling of sneaking away for a few hours to hunt in the woods of District Twelve. A brief reprieve away from everything else, even when they were together for days straight. Reprieve from what? Everything that came before, maybe.

  
There were things in this that logically made no sense, but she couldn't hold for logic very often. The most important thing was finding something that worked, try and rebuild a semblance of happiness. At times it seemed like a task with no hope, but she would try because there was nothing else left to be done.

  
It was like this that she, Gale, and Primrose made a small life for themselves. She and Gale were in the same house because he made it bearable. Primrose was next door, though more frequently in the spare bedroom of their home. Haymitch was a neighbor and frequent visitor and he did still feel like family, she found.

  
Katniss tried to visit Peeta, but it was difficult and she was tired of being forced into generosity.

  
But despite that, with Primrose tucked under her chin in a hug (this was frequent and it made her feel a little less like a murderer and more like a sister, usually), she thought some feeling might be finally returning.

**Author's Note:**

> It's been a long time since I read or saw the Hunger Games, but the announcement of the prequel and some other stuff has me hyped again. Hunger Games Renaissance, anyone?


End file.
